So here I am on a summer day in my backyard, walking my horse past a pile of stones where there’s a big gap in an old rock wall (and where, by the way, I pass numerous times a day, as do my chickens, and my cats, and sometimes the dog…). La-dee-dah—we’re going out to eat grass for a bit, just like always, routine, nothing to see here. And then I hear it—a distinctive “whrrrrr” that means just one thing—rattlesnake. And then I see it, the tail-end, rattle and all, slithering over a rock and on into a snug, snake-sized cubby in the pile of stones.

Uh-oh.

Actually, more like oh, crap.

Well, nothing to worry about, I think, channeling all the good info I’d just read in a Mountain Home story about rattlesnakes and a guy who likes them (June 2024). He/she is probably just passing through. Maybe eating a chipmunk or two (there are lots this year) and taking a break to digest. OK. I’ll just be very, very mindful when I’m walking by here, announce my presence somehow (Saying “hello” in a chipper voice does a fat lot of good, however, as rattlesnakes don’t have ears.); try to keep the animals away from that spot (although how I’m going to do that with the chickens and the cats I don’t know); oh, and warn my son, who’s visiting, to be on the alert when he walks by.

It wasn’t long before he did—just curious, he says, as he’d never seen a rattlesnake out and about before—and then he calls out to me.

“Mom, you’ve got to see this.”

“What?” I say.

“There are two of them.”

“What do you mean, two of them?”

“Look.”

And, yes, there were two. Two quite black and big-around rattlesnakes curled up together, just like kittens. Scaly kittens with flickering, forked tongues and eyes that blink slowly and deliberately.

Great.

I call the snake guy, Steve Henneman, for some advice. He says what he’d said in the article—that they were probably on their way somewhere.

And where might that be? Five feet or five miles away? Shopping? Vacation? House hunting? If they are a couple, the last thing I want is for them to decide to have their children here.

Anyhow, Steve agrees to come on a moral support/reconnaissance mission, but, of course, the afternoon he’s here the snakes are not. He couldn’t come back the next day, but they did. Steve and I play phone and email tag for the next couple of weeks, and the snakes have fun at my expense. I see them periodically, usually curled up together, but once all stretched out—just showing off, I guess. I’ve seen three others on the road since I first saw these two, and, yes, I stopped the car and waited until they slithered off onto the shoulder so some idiot wouldn’t feel obliged to run over them.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, to live in such close proximity to something that can kill you. Maybe the snakes say that to each other, too, about us.